DEMOCRATS.COM TAKES UP A DISCREDITED MEME

Last week we all watched via satellite as many Iraqis, with a little help from the US Marines, toppled a hollow statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad, symbolically killing off the Ba'athist regime that had held Iraq in its grip since 1968. People who love freedom and despise tyranny around the world celebrated, and rightly so--we'd just seen the end of a madman's reign over millions of people.

But not everyone celebrated. Indymedia immediately put out a conspiracy theory, which was promptly debunked at OxBlog.

Now, Democrats.com has taken up the story. The group that counts among its founders a former Clinton administration official, and that has close ties to the more rabid wing of the Democrat party (think James Carville, Sid Blumenthal et al), and is even supported by Clinton himself, is in for the new lie. In today's email newsletter, Democrats.com has this to say:

__Fake 'Dancing In The Streets' - Free Iraqi Forces Get Around

Was the toppling of Saddam's statue a staged media event? There were only 150
celebrating Iraqis. Most curious is that one of the cheering Iraqis looks a
heck-of-a-lot like a member of Ahmed Chalabi's 'Free Iraqi Forces' militia.

That number--150--has already been shot out by OxBlog so I won't go into that here. There were many, many more than 150 Iraqis on hand to help knock that statue down, and dismember it, and drag its head through the streets. The Dems.com newsletter links to this picture, which includes the debunked IndyMedia shot along with some mug shot of a Iraqi National Congress person, which Dems.com alleges showed up at the toppling. This, to Dems.com's furtile imagination, locks the toppling as a propaganda ploy.

The proper response, supposing that it is the same person in both photos (a big "if"), is "And your point is?" INC activists have been Iraq for weeks prior to the war. In fact, many of them never left Iraq--they've been there all the time. Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the INC, only left in 1996 when the Clinton administration idiotically allowed Iraqi troops to mass against his forces in northern Iraq and blast them with tanks and artillery. In fact, the Clinton administration has a rather shaky history with Iraq and opposition leaders and groups. It just about got Chalabi killed in '96, and did get a couple of Saddam Hussein's son-in-laws killed after mishandling their defections in the mid-90s. But that's a story for another time.

For this time, is it unreasonable to expect INC folks to show up at the momentous toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad? Does their presence, supposing it's even true, at that event automatically mean there's some sort of dark conspiracy behind the whole thing? The answer to both questions is of course not. INC activists have been working for the end of Saddam's regime for years; some have been working from within Iraq for a long time. You'd expect them to show up when Saddam's statue fell--that's the day they've been pining for for years. Where else would one expect them to be--shopping for loo-rolls with Robert Fisk?

What this little episode shows, more than anything else, is that the left prefers to make up and believe lies rather than accept the truth--that their political opposites are capable of doing good work around the world without them, and even in spite of them. Having castigated Bush as "Hitler," they can't accept the fact that Bush just killed a Hitler off without their support. It's too jarring to their self-righteous and self-centered view of the world, so they comfort themselves with conspiracies.

Next thing you know, missing former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf will show up in Washington to work as the DNC's communication chief.